Containers for plants…they seem to be everywhere. From the big box stores to grocery stores, you see them with their Made in Mexico or Made in China labels at prices that are unbelievably cheap. I am guilty of buying those pieces, but this year I turned my focus to making a series of self-watering containers for plants that are a cut above the mass-produced imports.

This particular piece came about from a challenge on a Potter’s Council online forum. The spring season in Tennessee is a time when we experience outbreaks of storms and tornadoes, so my Spring-themed container for a plant pays homage to those destructive events with a hat tip to a famous scene from the Wizard of Oz.

Now that I have opened this can of worms, I have to decide if it is worth it to make more of these things. The nature of the design takes it out of the realm of mass production and the detail takes so much time that it will be difficult to recover the investment in time and energy. My wife has declared this a collector’s item (hers) and has already pointed to the plant that she wants to see growing in this container. I am OK with that idea…I had already experienced nightmares on what it would take to ship this thing with protruding legs as far as Kansas…or across the street for that matter.

I do like the idea of narrative pots. It seems a shame that the humble container for dirt and plants doesn’t seem to be worthy of artistic respect. Perhaps an new class of container classification would boost the reputation of the narrative pot…something like Conteneur de Fleur – Fantaisie could bump the price tag up to something respectable. So, before this post sounds too much like whining, I did have fun making this piece and that enjoyment has a great deal of value to me. Now, I have to work on getting that “Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead…” music out of my head. I am definitely NOT in Kansas, Dorothy!

F3 – The Wicked Witch is Dead 18″ tall stoneware container for plants with self-watering features. Principal container is wheel-thrown in three separate pieces then assembled with hand-built house parts and stocking legs. Underglaze was applied to the stockings and shoes then the entire piece was sprayed with multiple, blended Cone 10 glazes. Final firing was reduction, Cone 10 in a Bailey gas kiln.

In the many hours of lab work that go along with getting a degree in architecture also came a bombardment of idiom-axioms that apply to the design process. Many are attributed to famous architects. Other idiom-axioms, I think, were just annoying things that my instructor would say for lack of something original in the way of a critique. You may have heard, “Less is more” and “Form follows function”…those still rattle around in the back of my head. I’m OK with those iconic-architectural skeletons. Those quotes take on different shades of meaning when applied to clay art rather than architecture.

When working on a personal assignment this semester, another old idiom/axiom floated to the surface: “Good is the enemy of the best”. This generally speaks to process more than it speaks to results in terms of design. That first sketch of a project might contain glimmers of brilliance (good), but additional development with an eye toward uniqueness often leads to “better” and “best”. I have experienced this on many levels in my years on a personal level as well as a collective/collaborative level. In a Google world, it is humbling to sketch up something that appears to be world-shattering-unique, only to discover that another individual has already done something similar and posted it online. But that is where the Good-Best uncomfortable dichotomy comes into play. Yes, I look at those sketches or the results of other artists and ask, “Is there another level above this? Is there a best that would be the enemy of these (good) results? Is there a twist, parody, derivative that will take me there?”

There are many questions that I ask myself when reflecting on sketches that have been set aside to mature or mellow. What once looked like a great idea becomes something better simply because of the original glimmer of good. So, enemy might be harsh, considering that good isn’t all that bad. But when it comes to striving toward best, a shot of reality harshness, be that from a humbling Google search, a mellowed sketch, or constructive criticism may be what it takes to be unsatisfied with good.

What may be the most difficult lesson to learn is that the trash can is your friend when good sketches push you toward best designs.

The Belmont University Alumni Art Exhibit runs for one more week. Visitors can stop by the Leu Center for the Visual Arts to see the work of seven Belmont alumni who have work in the show. This was my fourth year to curate the show and my second year to have ceramic pieces exhibited. There is an article in Belmont News that covers the show well and I understand that another article is coming soon in The Contributor.

The pieces shown in this image are the finished product that I wrote about at the end of last year as I was preparing for this exhibit. It does feel good to hear the positive feedback from friends, faculty, and fellow artists. In the next few weeks, I hope to have an announcement about representation for my sculptural bottles. I’m keeping my fingers crossed!

It has been a while since I took a day to construct a sculptural ocarina. For those who have not been following along, my sculptural ocarinas are fully functional, single octave ceramic musical instruments plus there is a significantly different, sculptural look to each of them. My earlier face-sculptured ocarinas did not have the detailed facial features of this piece. For several months I have been studying portrait sculpture and facial anatomy to get a better understanding of how to form facial emotions with some degree of believability. Even though the face on this ocarina is caricature-like, I would like to believe that the direction is toward believability.

One commenter on my Flickr account noted that this instrument looks either Mayan or Aztec. That is intentional and may be more evident if I can master the making of custom decals…but that is a post for another day.

Ocarinas with this much ornamentation (approximately 9 separate pieces assembled) brings with it a greater risk that cracking or breakage may happen in the firing process. The majority of these pieces survive. Some do not function as well after firing as a ceramic musical instrument due to warpage in the airway and tone-producing fipple area…all the more reason to at least have a surviving sculptural piece that can make a great conversation piece.

I have been asked on several occasions, “Why are these pieces so expensive?” The total time to form, carve, assemble, tune, fire, glaze, and re-glaze several times can be upward of 20-30 hours. Factor in the cost of materials and energy and what may look like a toy become something of a serious investment. For me personally, the “AH-HA” moment when a new friend hears the flute-like sound for the first time and inevitably smiles one of those happy, raised-eyebrow smiles makes it all worthwhile.

If there is a pattern in my recent work, it is a fascination with portrait sculpture, particularly the capturing of human emotion via facial expressions. Students in Clay I constructed some really interesting, multimedia clay masks last semester while I was sequestered in a corner of the lab carving architectural pieces for this month’s show. As a testament to the influence of learning communities, I must confess that those masks were an influence in the mini-mask direction that you see here.

I still refer to Philippe and Charisse Faraut’s book, Mastering Portraiture- Advanced Analyses of the Face Sculpted in Clay, on a regular basis. There is so much great information on the art and anatomy of portrait sculpture illustrated in the book, I consider it a must-have companion when sculpting clay faces. I am still hopeful that this summer’s travel schedule will not conflict with an opportunity to study directly under Philippe at a weekend workshop somewhere close.

A full-scale portrait sculpture still takes me all day to complete, but these hand-sized studies can be pinched from a fist-sized ball of clay and completed in about three hours. It does get a little easier to do with practice…and a review of the first of these with the last of these seems to tell me that I am making progress. Ultimately, I envision 5-7 of these little guys displayed together in some sort of installation…that’s not a completely original concept, but it is new to me.

This a different sort of whistling vessel – ceramic musical instrument. Only the fact that it plays two tones slips this into a category as an instrument, otherwise it is a tone sculpture. Some 25+ wheel-thrown and hand-built pieces of stoneware were assembled to bring this piece up to its maximum height of 25 inches. Now that it has been bisque fired to 1700 degrees (F), the actual height is closer to 23.5 inches.

This ceremonial whistling bottle sounds when one of two events happen. By removing the small, stopper-head on the back side, the vessel can be filled with water. After replacing the stopper, the entire piece can be rocked forward (ceremoniously bowing), until water escapes through the rolled tongue of the larger head at the top. Due to the design of the tube that feeds the spout, a slight back pressure forces air up a second tube that will play the whistle locate beneath the surface of the nose on the larger head as the water flows from the spout. The second way that this piece sounds happens when the partially filled vessel is rocked back to its upright position. Air passing back through the tube and airway spout create a column of air that plays the whistle in the smaller bottle-stopper head. Yes. I know that sounds complicated… but it is that level of sophistication that the Inca figured out several hundred years ago. That is a sophistication that I still find humbling in today’s world of high tech.

There are intentional sides to this piece that reveal characteristics of a woman, a posture of worship, a gargoyle-like protector, and the mechanical mysteries of sounding a tone and delivering a stream of water. I will leave it up to Dr. Ephriam Bowen to tell the story behind this ceremonial vessel. In the meantime, the stoneware survived its initial firing and awaits staining and glazing. Pictures of the construction process will be coming soon.

I have some serious doubts that ancient, mesoamerican musical instrument builders spent time building maquettes of the ceramic musical instruments they created. Maquette has French, Italian, and Latin genes, originally translated as “speck” or stain”. In contemporary use, it is more commonly used by architects and sculptors to mean a small-scaled, study model for a larger piece. Arguably, ancient Mayan and Incan musical instruments that feature a character holding/playing a much smaller ceramic musical instrument qualifies, I suppose, as a maquette.

For me, the retired architect, building a maquette for a complex piece that is intended to be both sculptural and functional makes sense. Certainly, sketches are my first step in visualizing what is coming from the mind’s eye and to establish some sense of scale, but there are other benefits. Clay is a very malleable and forgiving media that enables the artist to make mid-course corrections and changes in the designs. Building a small maquette helps to reveal some of those options that might otherwise hide themselves in a two-dimensional drawing.

The maquette and sketches in the picture on this post are for the whistling vessel that is currently under construction. Not wanting to fire the work in multiple pieces, the interior height of the electric kiln became a major factor in the scale of the project. Between the sketching and the constructing of the maquette, a number of changes happened to the original concept as the piece evolved into something that (potentially) will be an unusual whistling vessel. In this instance, the pouring of water through the vessel will play a tone as the water escapes the spout, and, the vessel will play a different tone through the stopper as the vessel is tilted back from a pouring position to its upright state. If it works, I will be thanking that Physics of Fluid Dynamics professor from decades ago. If it doesn’t work, I’ll be blaming the “C-” that I received in the course *grin*.